I come to see you each day,enchanted steamer always distant . . .Your eyes are two blonde captains;your lip is the smallest red kerchiefwaving a farewell of blood!I come to see you pass; until one day,intoxicated with time and cruelty,enchanted steamer always distant,the star of evening will be parting!The rigging; winds that betray; the windsof a woman who has passed!Your cold captains will give their orders;and it will be I who will have parted . . .

Regal Beauty! Your veins are fermentsof my ancient nonbeing and of the blackchampagne of my living!Your hair is the unknown rootletof the tree of my vine.Your hair is the strand of a splendidmitre I lost!Your body is the frothing tumultof a crimsoned Jordan;and it undulates, like a beatific lashthat humiliated the serpent of evil!Your arms yield the thirst for the infinite,with their chaste Pleiades of light,as two white redemptive roads,two dying births of a cross.And they are formed in the unconquered bloodof my unattainable blue!Your feet are two heraldic larkseternally arriving from my yesterday!Regal Beauty! Your feet are the two tearsI stifled in my descent from the Spirit,on a Palm Sunday I entered the World,now forever distant from Bethlehem!

It hails so much, as if to make me recalland increase the pearlsthat I've gathered from the very snoutof every storm.

May this rain not dry up.Unless I am permittedto fall now for it, or unless they bury medrenched in the waterthat would surge from all fires.

This rain, how far will it reach me?I'm afraid I'm left with one flank dry;afraid that it's ending, without having tested mein droughts of incredible vocal cords,by which,to create harmony,one must always rise--never descend!Don't we rise in fact downward?

From these walls we demolish the last few pavilions that were singing.The foliage has grown. I see peasants working, their backs loaded with success.And the elapsed month and a half are enough for one shroud, even too much.

Room with four entrances and no exit, today you have the blues, I speak to youin all your six dialects.Now I won't have to violate what you are to me, never; now we will not breach any other beloved door.

July was, then, the ninth month. Love told an odd sound. And the sweetness gave to every shroud, even too much.

Mother, tomorrow I'm off to Santiago to drench myself in your blessing and in your lament. I am arranging my disillusions and the sore's pink of my false bustling.

Your arch of surprise will wait for me, the tonsured columns of your life-wasting longings. The patio will wait for me, the hallway downstairs with its moldings and festive ornaments. My tutor armchair will wait for me, that good big-jawed furniture of dynastic leather, that does nothing but grumble at the great- great-grandchild buttocks, from strap to little strap.

I am sifting my purest affections, I'm axising, Can't you hear the plummet panting? Can't you hear the reveilles straining? I am shaping your formula of love for all the hollows of this soil. Oh if all the silent wheels were disposed to all the most distant ribbons, to all the most different dates.

Thus, dead immortal. Thus. Under the double arches of your blood, through which one must pass so stealthily, that even my father to go through there, humbled himself down to less than half-man, until being the first child you had.

Thus, dead immortal. Between the colonnade of your bones that even a sob cannot tumble down, and into whose side not even Destiny could intrude a single finger of his. Thus, dead immortal. Thus.

Tonight I get down from my horse by the front door of the house, whereI waved goodbye as the rooster crowed.It's locked and no one answers.

The bench where Mama showedmy older brother how to saddlebacks I'd ridden bare along the roads and fields, village kid;the bench where I left , to yellow in the sun,my painful childhood . . . and that painthat frames the doorway?

A deity in the strange peace,the beast, as though calling too, sneezesand sniffs, stamping the paving-stone. Then, doubtful,he whinnieswith a lively shake of his ears.

Papa must be praying late, and perhapshe'll think it's I who've kept him up.My sisters, buzzing with their fantasies,simple and bubbling overwith plans for the party coming soon,and now almost nothing is missing.I wait, I wait, my heartan egg about to hatch, past its time.

Numerous family we leftnot long ago, now no one keeps watch, not even a candleset in the niche for our safe return.

I call again, and nothing.We fall silent and begin to sob, and the animalwhinnies, whinnies again.

They're all sleeping forever,and so much the better, since finallymy horse begins to nod from drowsinessin his turn and between naps at every bobbing saysthat it's all right, everything's quite all right.

The sphere spins on the flint of time, and sharpens, sharpens till it wants to lose itself; it spins forging, before the deserted flanks, that point so frighteningly known, because it has gestated, turn and turn again, the familiar little corral.

And we'll get up when we feel like it, although Mother, all clarity, with her beautiful and birdsong maternal anger wakes us. We'll laugh slyly at this, chewing the edge of the warm vicuña bedspreads - and you can't do things to me!

The smoke from the thatched cabins - rough urchins! They'd rise early to play with their blue, bluish kites, and stealing roof-beams and stones, they would give us to take out to the infant air that doesn't even know its letters, to battle over strings.

Another day you'll want to pasture among your navel hollows ravenous caverns ninth months, my curtains. Or you'll want to accompany the ancient to unplug the opening of a twilight, so that by day it jets all the water that passes at night.

And you arrive dying of laughter and in the musical lunch, roasted maize, flour with lard, with lard, you pull the leg of the stretched-out farmhand who once again forgets to say good day, those days of his, good with the b of beggar, that insist on emerging from the poor man by the buttock of the v dentilabial that watches over him.

A lie! So I did it to trick you,that's all. There it is. Anyway,even you are going to seehow sorry I'll be for having been like that.

It's a lie! Hush!It's over now.Just like sometimes you've done the same to me,that's why I did it.

Me, the way I snooped to make sure you reallywere crying,since there were other times you only kept onsniveling to look sweet.Me, who never dreamed you'd believe those things,your tears won me over.That's it.

So now you know: the whole thing was a lie.And if you keep on crying, all right for you!Next time I won't even see you when you're playing.

Who lit the match!I'm swaying. I smileswinging justified.I smile even more, if everyone comesto see the colourless guidesand me always on time. I don't care.

And that good Sun who, dying of pleasure, cuts everything up to distribute itamong shadows, the prodigal,not even he would wait for me on the other side.Nor the rest who keep onlyentering and leaving.

The great baker callswith tolling retinas. And we pay in gesturesmost curious the warm irrefutable valuebaked, transcendent.And we have coffee, already late,with deficient sugar that's been lacking,and butterless bread. What can we do.

We struggle to thread ourselves through a needle's eye,face to face, hellbent on winning. The fourth angle of the circle ammoniafies almost. Female is continued the male, on the basisof probable breasts, and preciselyon the basis of how much does not flower!

Are you that way, Venus of Milo?You hardly act crippled, pullulatingenwombed in the plenary armsof existence,of this existence that neverthelessez perpetual imperfection.Venus de Milo, whose cut off, increatearm swings round and tries to elbowacross greening stuttering pebbles,ortive nautili, recently crawlingevens, immortal on the eves of.Lassoer of imminences, lassoerof the parenthesis.

Refuse, all of you, to set footon the double security of Harmony.Truly refuse symmetry.Intervene in the conflictof points that contendin the most rutty of joustsfor the leap through the needle's eye!

So now I feel my little fingermoreover on my left. I see it and thinkit shouldn't be me, or at least that it'sin a place where it shouldn't.And it inspires me with rage and alarms meand there is no way out of it, except bypretending that today is Thursday.

If tonight it rains, I would withdraw a thousand years from here.Better a hundred, no more.As if nothing had happened, I would imagine I am still becoming.

Or motherless, loverless, without the insistent kneeling to spy the pure, innermostpulse,on a night like this, I would be combing the vedic fibre,the vedic wool of my final end, devil's sign of having held by their nostrilstime's two disconsonant clappers in a single bell.

Taking count of my lifeor accounting that I am still unborn will not be enough to deliver me.

What has not yet arrived will not be, but what has come and already gone, but what has come and already gone.

I've had lunch alone now, and without mother,or request, or serve-yourself, or water,or father who, in the fluent offertoryof tender corn, might ask, through his belatedimage, for the older clasps of sound.

How was I to have lunch. How was I to servethose things from such distant dishes,when one's own home might be broken up,when no mother shows up at the lips.How was I to eat the slightest thing.

I've had lunch at the table of a good friendwith his father just back from the world,with his white-haired aunts who speakin mottled tinges of porcelain,muttering through all their widowed cavities;and with generous settings of happy wheezesbecause they are at home. Sure, what a feat!And the knives of this table have hurt meall over my palate.

Dining on such tables as these, in which one tastes another love instead of one's own,turns into earth the mouthful not offered by theMOTHER,turns the hard swallow into a blow; the sweet,bile; funereal oil, the coffee.

When your own home is already broken up,and the motherly serve-yourself comes no more from the grave,the kitchen in darkness, the wretchedness of love.

Oh the cell's four walls.Ah the four whitish wallsyielding ever the same result.

Cradle of nerves, fateful breach,how day after day, with its four cornersit tears apart the fettered limbs.

Loving wardess with countless keys,were you here, could you see to whatlate hour these walls are four.Up against them, with you, we bothwould be two, more two than ever. Nor would you cry,right, rescuer!

Ah the cell's walls.Of these I ache, meanwhile, morefrom the two long ones which tonightevoke mothers long deadleading down bromided slopes,each a child by the hand.

And only I am left behindwith a right hand that works for both,raised, on the look out for a tertiary armthat between my where and my whenmay pupil this disabled maturity of manhood.

I have found a girlin the street, and she has hugged me.X, ausculted, whoever found her and finds her,will not remember her.

This girl is my cousin. Today, after touchingher waist, my hands have entered into her ageLike into a pair of badly finished tombs.And by the same desolation she left,delta on to the darkening sun,warble between us.

“I got married”,she tells me. With what we did as childrenat the house of the dead aunt.She got married.She got married.

Late latitudinal years,what true wishes have come to usto play to the bulls, to the yokes,but everything teasingly, in candor, like it was.

Dicotyledon group. Overturing petrels, propensities of trinity, finales that begin, ohs of sighs believing themselves inspired by heterogeneity. Group of two cotyledons!

Let's see. That it is without being more. Let's see. Don't transcend and think in the sound of being unheard, and chrome and be unseen. And don't gliss over the great collapse.

The created voice revolts and wants to be neither net, nor love. The betrothed are betrothed in eternity. So don't strike 1, which will resound to infinity. And don't strike 0, which will be so silent until it rouses and raises the 1.

Two carts squeal against hammers until the lachrymals trifurcatewhen we never did anything to them. To that other, yes, unloved,embittered in the open tunnel by the one, and into harsh algidproofs infusing spirit.

I stretched out in the manner of the third party,much later - how will we f-f-fasten it? -rings in my head, furiously,not wanting to take doses of mother. The rings exist.Tropic nuptials already threshing.Withdrawing, better than all else,cleaves the Crucible.

Which was not discoloredfor nothing. Side by side by destiny, weeps and weeps. The entire song squared in three silences.

Caloric. Ovary. Almost transparent. All has been wept. All has been veiledin the middle of the left hand.

The grownups What time are they coming back?Blind Santiago is tolling sixand it's already very dark.

Mother said she wouldn't be long.

Aguedita, Nativa, Miguel,be careful going by there, wheredoubled-over griefssnuffling their memories have just passed bytoward the silent barnyard, and wherethe hens are only now settling downthey were so scared.We'd better stay right here.Mother said she wouldn't be long.

We shouldn't be upset. Let's go seethe boats - mine's the prettiest of all --that we play with the whole blessed daywithout fighting, as it should be:they're still in the puddle, readywith a cargo of good things for tomorrow.

Let's wait like this, obedient, since there'sno choice, for the return, the excusesof the grownups, always the firstto leave us little ones at homeas though we too couldn't go away.

Aguedita, Nativa, Miguel?I am calling, I'm groping around in the darkness.You can't have left me here alone,and the only one shut in is me.

Children of the world,if Spain falls, -I say, to you I say-if she fallsdown from the sky,catch her arm of roasting fleshin a sling between two sheets of earth’ s metal;children, how old that curved brow!how soon in that sun what I told you of!how quick at breast the ancient rumbles!how aged your 2 in the school notebook!

Children of the world,Mother Spain is here cradling her own womb;she is our teacher with her switches,she is mother and teacher,cross and wood, because she brings youthe dizzying heights and division, and sums, children.She is self-contained, you prosecuting fathers!

If she falls, I say, to you I say,if Spain falls, the earth tumbling down,children, how you will stop growing!how the year is going to punish the month!how your mouth will not grow more than ten teeth,your diphthongs will be switched, your medals will wail!How the roasted lamb’s hide will go on and ontied by the paw to the great inkpot!How you are going to descend the steps of the alphabetuntil you arrive at the letter in which pain was born!

Children,sons of warriors, just then,lower your voice, for Spain at this moment is dividing upher powers between the rule of the beast,the flowering things, the comets, and mankind.

Lower your voice, for she isstill with her severity, which is great, not knowingwhat to do, and she has in her handthe talking skull, and it talks and talks,the skull, that one with braided hair,the skull, that one that is alive!

Lower your voice, I tell you;lower your voice, the song all of syllables, the cryof matter and the low babel of the pyramids,the empty skulls’ song that walks carrying two stones!

Lower your breath, and ifher arm comes down,and if the switches swish, if it is night,if the heavens fit into two earthly Purgatories,if there is a racket in the doors’ voices,if I am late,if you don’t see anybody and if the unsharpened pencilsfrighten you, and if your MotherSpain falls, -I say, to you I say-leave, children of the world. Go and find her!

Today I like life much less, But I like to live anyway: I have often said it. I almost touched the part of my whole and restrained myself with a shot in the tongue behind my word.

Today I touch my chin in retreat and in these momentary trousers I tell myself: So much life and never! So many years and always my weeks!... My parents buried with their stone and their sad stiffening that has not ended; full length brothers, my brothers and, finally, my Being standing and in a vest.

I like life enormously but, of course with my beloved death and my cafe and looking at the leafy chestnut trees in Paris and saying: This is an eye, that one too; this a forehead, that one too...and repeating: So much life and the tune never fails me! So many years and always, always, always!(...)

I do not suffer this pain as César Vallejo. I do not ache now as an artist, as a man or even as a simple living being. I do not suffer this pain as a Catholic, as a Mohammedan or as an atheist. Today I am simply in pain. If my name were not César Vallejo, I would still suffer this very same pain. If I were not an artist, I would still suffer it. If I were not a Catholic, atheist or Mohammedan, I would still suffer it. Today I am in pain from further below. Today I am simply in pain.

I ache now without any explanation. My pain is so deep, that it never had a cause nor does it lack a cause now. What could have been its cause? Where is that thing so important, that it might stop being its cause? Its cause is nothing; nothing could have stopped being its cause. For what has this pain been born, for itself? My pain comes from the north wind and from the south wind, like those neuter eggs certain rare birds lay in the wind. If my bride were dead, my pain would be the same. If they had slashed my throat all the way through, my pain would be the same. If life were, in short, different, my pain would be the same. Today I suffer from further above. Today I am simply in pain.

I look at the hungry man's pain and see that his hunger is so far from my suffering, that if I were to fast unto death, at least a blade of grass would always sprout from my tomb. The same with the lover! How engendered his blood it, in contrast to mine without source or use!

I believed until now that all the things of the universe were, inevitably, parents or sons. But behold that my pain today is neither parent nor son. It lacks a back to darken, as well as having too much chest to dawn and if they put it in a dark room, it would not give light and if they put it in a brightly lit room, it would cast no shadow. Today I suffer no matter what happens. Today I am simply in pain.

Today no one has come to inquire, nor have they wanted anything from me this afternoon. I have not seen a single cemetery flower in so happy a procession of lights. Forgive me, Lord! I have died so little! This afternoon everyone, everyone goes by without asking or begging me anything. And I do not know what it is they forget, and it is heavy in my hands like something stolen. I have come to the door, and I want to shout at everyone: —If you miss something, here it is! Because in all the afternoons of this life, I do not know how many doors are slammed on a face, and my soul takes something that belongs to another. Today nobody has come; and today I have died so little in the afternoon!

And, finally, passing now into the domain of death,which acts as squadron, former bracket,paragraph and key, huge hand and dieresis,for what the Assyrian desk? for what the Christian pulpit,the intense tug of Vandal furnitureor, even less, this proparoxytonic retreat?

Is it in order to end,tomorrow, as a prototype of phallic display,as diabetes and as a white bedpan,as a geometric face, as a deadman,that sermon and almonds become necessary,that there are literally too many potatoesand this watery spectre in which the gold blazesand in which the price of snow burns?Is it for this, that we die so much?Only to die,must we die each instant?And the paragraph that I write?And the deistic bracket that I raise on high?And the squadron in which my skull broke down?And the key which fits all doors?And the forensic dieresis, the hand,my potato and my flesh and my contradiction under the bedsheet?

Out of my mind, out of my wolvum, out of my lamb, out of my sensible horsessence!Desk, yes, my whole life long; pulpit,likewise, my whole death long!Sermon on barbarism: these papers;proparoxytonic retreat: this skin.

In this way, cognitive, auriferous, thick-armed, I will defend my catch in two moments,with my voice and also with my larynx,and of the physical smell with which I prayand of the instinct for immobility with which I walk,I will be proud while I'm alive—it must be said;my horseflies will swell with pride,because, at the center, I am, and to the right,likewise, and, to the left, equally.

Today a splinter has gotten into her close, striking herclose, hard, in her wayof being and in her now famous penny.Fate has pained her terribly,all over;the door has pained her,the girdle has pained her, giving herthirst, afflixion and thirst for the glass but not for the wine.Today, secretly, the smoke of her dogma poured out of the poor neighbor of the air;today a splinter has gotten into her.

Immensity pursues her at a superficial distance, at a vast linkage.Today on one cheek, north, and on one cheek, eastcame out of the poor neighbor of the wind;today a splinter has gotten into her.

Who will buy, in these harsh, perishable days,a bit of coffee with milk,and who, without her, will descend her path until giving birth?Sad are the splinters that get into herall at once,exactly there precisely!

Today a flame quenched in the oracleentered the poor neighbor of the voyage;today a splinter has gotten into her.

The pain has pained her, the young pain,the child pain, stabbing pain, striking herin the handsand giving her thirst, afflixionand thirst for the glass but not for the wine.The poor, poor little thing!

A man is looking at a woman,is looking at her immediately,with his sumptuous homesicknessand he looks at her two-handedlyand he knocks her down two-chestedlyand he moves her two-shoulderly.

I ask myself then, overpoweringmy enormous, white, zealous rib:And this manhasn't he had a child as a growing father?And this woman, a childas a builder of her evident sex?

Because I see a child now,a centipede child, impassioned, energetic:I see that they do not see himblow his nose between them, wag his tail, get dressed;because I accept them,her in an augmentative condition,him in the flection of golden hay.

And I exclaim then, without ceasing even onceto live, without turning even onceto tremble in the joust I venerate:Happiness followedbelatedly by the Father,by the Son and by the Mother!Round familiarinstant, that no one any longer feels or loves!From what an aphonic, dark red dazzlethe Song of Songs is performed!From what a trunk, the florid carpenter!From what a perfect axial, the fragile oar!From what a hoof, both forehoofs!

The pleasure of suffering, of hating, dyes mythroat with plastic venoms,but the bristle that implants its magic order,its taurine grandeur, between the first stringand the sixthand the mendacious eighth, suffers them all.

The pleasure of suffering… Who? Whom?who, the molars? whom society,the carbides of rage in the gums?How to beand to be here, without angering one's neighbor?

You are worthier than my number, man alone,and worthier than all the dictionary,with its prose in poetry,its poetry in prose,are your eagle display,your tiger machinery, bland fellow man.

The pleasure of suffering,of hoping for hope at the table,Sunday with all its languages,Saturday with Chinese, Belgian hours,the week, with two hockers.

The pleasure of waiting in slippers,of waiting contracted behind a stanza,of waiting empowered with a sick pintle;the pleasure of suffering: hard left by a femaledead with a stone on her waistand dead between the string and the guitar,crying the days and singing the months.